Sir Christopher Heydon was an English soldier, Member of Parliament, and writer on astrology.
22 Facts About Christopher Heydon
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Christopher Heydon quarrelled with his family over its estates in Norfolk.
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Christopher Heydon was educated at Gresham's School, Holt and Peterhouse, Cambridge, where he knew the young Robert Devereux, 2nd Earl of Essex, and after graduating BA in 1579 travelled widely on the continent.
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The dispute dragged on for years, and when Sir William died in 1594, he left his estate to his widow, but Christopher Heydon then went to law against her.
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Lady Christopher Heydon appealed to Queen Elizabeth, and the dispute was settled on her orders by the Lord Keeper.
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In 1586, while he was still a young man, Christopher Heydon stood for the Norfolk county constituency of the Parliament of England.
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Christopher Heydon served as a Justice of the Peace from 1586 and was a commissioner for musters in the 1590s.
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Christopher Heydon joined the Earl of Essex and took part in his capture of Cadiz in 1596, where he was knighted.
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Christopher Heydon went into hiding and wrote to Sir Robert Cecil, offering to pay a fine.
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Christopher Heydon's finances were very low, and in 1614 he was forced to mortgage the rest of his estates.
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Christopher Heydon's best-known work was A Defence of Judiciall Astrologie, the most substantial English defence of astrology of its day, rebutting John Chamber's A Treatise Against Judiciall Astrologie, which had called for parliament to outlaw astrology.
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Christopher Heydon argued that it was a valid science, compatible with Christianity.
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In writing A Defence of Judiciall Astrologie, Christopher Heydon had the help of the Reverend William Bredon, who was both a clergyman and an astrologer and was at the time Christopher Heydon's chaplain.
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Christopher Heydon's work was given weight by his social standing and the lack of challenges to it.
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Christopher Heydon made elaborate predictions for 1608 and 1609, which remained unpublished.
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Christopher Heydon foresaw that Spain would lose the Indies and predicted that the Austrian Habsburgs would fall in 1623 and Rome in 1646: this would lead to the ruin of the Ottomans and the rise of Christ's kingdom, "the fifth Monarchie of the World", in about 1682.
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Christopher Heydon remained a champion of militant Protestantism to the end.
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Christopher Heydon had many astronomical interests and was a close friend of the mathematician Henry Briggs and the astronomer John Bainbridge, lending them instruments, sending them astronomical papers, and inviting them to stay at Baconsthorpe.
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Christopher Heydon wrote a treatise on the comet of 1618 and described his own astronomical observations with instruments made by his friend Edward Wright.
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Christopher Heydon married, first, Mirabel, daughter of the London alderman Sir Thomas Rivet, but she died at the age of twenty-two.
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Christopher Heydon built her a large and ornate tomb at Saxlingham, covered with hieroglyphs which he explained in a treatise now lost.
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Christopher Heydon married secondly Anne, daughter of John Dodge and widow of John Potts of Mannington, Norfolk, in or before 1599.